Be Excellent To Each Other

Got my mate's computer here and it's fucked. Her other mate installed the drivers for some old printer (parallell port, ffs) and now it don't boot. It gets past the XP splash, as far as an empty screen withy pointer, then resets. Does the same in safe mode, so I'm out of ideas.

Maybe you are not, though...

if you have the install disks, you should be able to boot from CD then choose repair, which will let you rollback to a last known good state

I'll downlod and burn an install disk. The computer is about nine and she's not a geek - the originals are probaby in another country by now, or landfill.

yep, they dont need to be original, any xp install disk would do. Infact, I think you can download the repair tool from the microsoft site.

more info here:
http://www.proprofs.com/mwiki/index.php ... ry_Console

You lovely boys, you!

If it was an Alienware that sort of shit would not happen.

didn't look at the link, but I would've disabled the Parallel port in the bios.

HULK SMASH!

Last known good state, safe mode, all of the options though the whiole shebang, do not work. It gets almost to desktop, pointer wiggling, then crashes.

registry_error

STOP: 0X000000051 (0X00000001, 0Xe1d6E008, 0X003(6OR8, POINTER HAS CRASHED)1000, 0X000001d6)


Is what the BsoD tells me. It then suggests I check new hardware is properly installed. Heh. Interestingly she's got somehting like 190 meg of ram in there, which is an unconventional amount - I'm wondering if this problem wasn't just waiting to happen and isn;t totally the parallell printer's fault. Disabled parallell as well, made fuck all diference. I've never had one borked like this before.

I'm guessing at this stage I'll just bang a dodgy XP Pro on there for her until she gets a new laptop in a month or two - unless there's a true genius out there.

196 meg perchance? 256 meg with shared gfx maybe. Or a 128mb stick and a 64mb stick?

I'm thinking the latter.

But then, I'm going to get out all my old ram now and start experimenting, aren't I? And I'll forget to note down what I've tried already, won't I? And she'll end up with me just sticking the best pair of sticks I've got in there and banging a fresh XP on it, and in a couple of months she'll get rid of the machine with my two best old sticks of ram in it - and so on.

Best just to get it running now. I wish I could just chuck Xubuntu on there and she'd be able to use it. I wish that so hard I could burst.

If it's a registry error you need to remove it. Have you googled the error code?

I'd try something like registry cleaner or Ashampoo. Don't let it do anything at first just run a scan (if you can) and see what it brings up.

It's definitely a driver issue. I've had a couple recently with my Nvidia graphics driver. It kept bsodding when the P.C went into standby so I ran the error code and it came back with "Graphics hardware driver error".

Also, try and find the crash dump file and open it in note pad. It'll give you info as to what was being loaded and stuff before the crash occured.

Also, make sure to try this, too.

Start - Run - msconfig.

When that opens look for the STARTUP tab and see what is loading when the computer does. You will find if it's an old install that all kinds of shit is. 90% of it does not need to load with XP any way, it'll load into memory when you choose to start it. So clean that out aswell (google the names if you have to to find out what they are and what they do).

Example - Nwiz.exe. That's the Nvidia control panel, that one needs to run.

Stuff like Itunes loads about four. Fuckin joke.

If you do find out it's a registry error then you can simply use regedit to take out the bad string (if you know what to look for and where it is).

It could be a memory overload, try upping the virtual memory on the hard drive to get the PC stable. Once you've done that you can do all of the above (hopefully).

BTW I know that some parallel ports need to be changed in the bios depending on the make of the printer. They work differently sometimes (epsons did back in the day).

It could, possibly, be an IRQ problem but that would be odd seeing as XP like 2k can make virtual IRQS. Mind you, if it is a hardware conflict on the board's IRQ it will lock up for sure.

Have you disabled the parallel port?

John, most of your suggestions won't work -- he can't get it to boot at all. Prodding the parallel port BIOS settings is a good one though, definitely try that GY. Try disabling it, and try setting it to (wracks brains, it's been a while): ECP/EPP mode. I think that's it.

That's proper fucked, GY. Ummm... If we assume it was the printer driver -- was that the last thing that was done to the machine before it stopped working? -- then you might be able to pick it out if you're careful and lucky. You need a BartPE boot disk from Pirate Bay (or download the tool and run it on a working Windows machine), boot that up, and mount the hard disk. From there you'll be able to get into the machine's registry and boot files and attempt whatever surgery is necessary to pull the driver out.

Personally, I'd reinstall though.